Artist Focus: Michael James Talbot
Michael James Talbot is a British sculptor, born in Staffordshire in the north of England in1959. After completing a BA honours degree in Sculpture, he gained a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts in London for post graduate study in 1980, winning the coveted Landseer prize in 1983. He studied further at The Sir Henry Doulton Sculpture School under Colin Melbourne ARCA and Dame Elizabeth Frink RA.
Michael was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1997 and was elected a member of the National Sculpture Society (USA) in 2012. The inspiration for Talbot`s work has always been the human form and its dramatic poetry. It is this, together with his exquisite skills that make his work so individual, intricate and beautiful.
Talbot creates the original clay sculpture which he then casts into bronze, uniquely finishing and patinating each sculpture. This process is wholly under his control allowing him to enhance and refine the final image. The wonder and fascination of sculpture is its ability to be a solid form that can be seen, touched and walked around and yet remain an object of pure spirit.
“Sculpture for me, is essentially a theatrical construction, an attempt to show and illuminate a chosen moment in time. I draw my creative inspiration from theatre, myth, dance and illusion. The inspiration for the Briseis and Ariadne sculptures were taken from plumes of water in a night-lit fountain which, with the distortion of the mind’s eye, figures appeared in the tumbling crest of a column of liquid energy. This, I have tried to capture in bronze, through the lost wax process, a technique from Ancient Greece, to render a timeless human narrative from the Myth of Greece. I like to give my sculptures choreography of form, tension and balance to lead the eye and capture a moment in time, sometimes I work with the fragment form rather than an entire figure (like Harlequin and Veil). This is a favourite artistic device often inspired by shadows of the model on the studio wall – because less is sometimes more.”
“I work from the live model in my pursuit of a particular momentary form or gesture. This I contrast with the absolute nature of bronze. It is what remains when time sweeps all else away. When we gaze into the face of an ancient bronze in a museum, what reaches out across the millennia of time is not how different, but how like us they were.”
– MJ Talbot
The Emergent Collection
The key to this unique collection of sculptures is know that each figure in the Emergent Collection is first fully sculpted in the round to an advanced and detailed level. Michael fixes the pose gesture and anatomy in the knowledge that half the features will be lost with the addition of the flat plains.
By adding, I take away, in doing so I’m saying “this aspect is important and this aspect can fade”. As so often in art, less is more.
– MJ Talbot
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